A Bit More on AMD’s Polaris GPUs: 36 & 16 CUs
by Ryan Smith on June 15, 2016 8:30 AM EST
Along with this week’s teaser of the forthcoming Radeon RX 470 and RX 460 at E3, AMD also held a short press briefing about Polaris. The bulk of AMD’s presentation is going to be familiar to our readers who keep close tabs on AMD’s market strategy (in a word, VR), but this latest presentation also brought to light a few more details on the company’s two Polaris GPUs that I want to quickly touch upon.
First and foremost, AMD’s presentation included a slide with pictures of the two chips, and confirmation on their full configurations. The larger Polaris 10 is a 36 CU (2304 SP) chip, meaning that the forthcoming Radeon RX 480 video card is using a fully enabled chip. Meanwhile the smaller Polaris 11 (note that these pictures aren’t necessarily to scale) packs 16 CUs (1024 SPs). This puts it a bit below Pitcairn (20 CUs) before factoring in GCN 4’s higher efficiency. Meanwhile as is common for these lower-power GPUs, AMD’s slide also confirms that it features a 128-bit memory bus.
AMD is expecting Polaris 11 to offer over 2 TFLOPs of performance. Assuming a very liberal range of 2.0 to 2.5 TFLOPs for possible shipping products, this would put clockspeeds of a high-end Polaris 11 part at between 975MHz and 1220MHz, which is similar to our projections for RX 480/Polaris 10. Note that AMD has not yet announced any specific product using Polaris 11, however as we now know that RX 470 is a Polaris 10 based card, it’s safe to assume that RX 460 is Polaris 11, and the over-2 TFLOPs projection is for that card.
Second, briefly mentioned in AMD’s press release on Monday was the low z-height of at least Polaris 11, and it pops up in this slide deck again. There was some confusion whether z-height referred to the laptop or the chip, but the slide makes it clear that this is about the chip. So it will be interesting to see how thin Polaris 11 is, how that compares to other chips, and just what manufacturers can in turn do with it.
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tipoo - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Pretty please yes. It's crazy that the most money I can pay for a Macbook today will get me GCN 1.0. The M370X doesn't even offer enough performance lead over my Iris Pro 5200 model for me to be tempted.trane - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
This is a sure shot. Macbook Pro is going to ship with RX 480M. As will XPS 15, and a whole bunch of notebooks. I bet a RX 470M or a lower power variant of Polaris 11 even makes it to ultrabooks like Surface Book. That's what the low z-height is about.lllll - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Both rx460 and rx470 look promising to me. However, rx480 should have best theoetical value (tflops / $)Wreckage - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Going by their own benchmark of Steam VR, the 480 is about as fast as a 290. That's very underwhelming. I guess Hardocp was right.doggface - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
390 not 290. And almost as good as a 980. For less than half the price.More importantly. Right smack bang in the mass market area where most people buy their GPUs.
Also very interested in polaris 11 if the price is right and the tdp is low...
geniekid - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Agreed. The RX 480's theoretical position on the price-performance curve will dominate NVidia in the market overall with current prices. NVidia won't let that happen of course. Rumors of 1060 specs are already making their rounds.Trixanity - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Steam VR is an unreliable benchmark. It's not even a benchmark really. It says cards like GTX 580 and GTX 560 Ti are VR ready (it is not) and other graphics cards score differently on each run - very differently. I've heard of a GTX 970 scoring between 6.1 to 7.9 (and everything in between) on the same machine. So don't put any stock in that.hechacker1 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
I agree. My old i7 920 @ 4GHz and a overclocked 970 (about 1500MHz boost) gets me a solid 7.7 and nearly "very high" settings. No frame drops or frames under 90fps. It's a weak test.T1beriu - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Seems so weird to act as if you still don't know about P10/P11 when you've been to many AMD meetings in the last month and probably you have many RX 480/470 in the office under NDA. :)pats1111 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
I have followed Anandtech for many years, and have watched them slide into an Advanced Micro Devices basher, and very Intel/Nvidia pro website, not to mention, GAG, Apple. I no longer take anything this site offers in the way of reviews seriously. To even mention Hardocp is blasphemous, they've been trashing AMD for years, and wonder why they weren't invited to the AMD announcement..... If you want realistic reviews, go elsewhere, specifically where you aren't seeing a multitude of ads on the pages for Intel/Nvidia/Iphone, et al...........